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Stars In A Wild Array
you're way closer to the end
than the beginning and now
free your mind of worries
since once we weren't even here
bright earth traveling in space yes
without us and soon
bright earth moving
round and round
the sun the moon
strong planets and
stars in a wild array
traveling without us
again unless we say
I am spirit always
I am awake in the west
I am spirit even
when I'm long gone
and real gone
gone for always
let's relax and say
you'll be spirit too
- Jack Crimmins
Sadness Street
“Coffee in the Park”, “Larks in the Fields”
Or “A Grove of Fountains”
Would be nicer poem titles
Were it not for the
Silent and stunning starkness
Of leveled neighborhoods, grey and gayless.
Where did all the stuff go?
Some wafted west and south
In choking clouds
And found on far off lawns and streets
as feather weight horror shadows
Of Aunts and tax records
And love letters.
Where are the fortunate
But still trembling souls who
Escaped over embers aglow
In that predawn October night
From those streets of Santa Rosa,
All now renamed
Sadness Street?
- Jeff Boal
Fire Empathy
The fires burn
And envelope
Houses erupt
And all is lost
History and its roots
In photos and memorabilia
The touch of spaces created
By love and children
Where I grew up
My friends in shelters
Perhaps moving on
In survival to other realms
Torn apart
Confused
Marked
The fires come and surround
In torrents of flame
Burst upon.
Those of us in forests
Feel the heat
As possible
Watch the winds
Pray for rain
Love those who fight the fires
Take in the refugees
Welcome!
You are us
We are you.
We change nature
Nature changes us
Irrevocably.
It is illusion
To feel we are safe from the natural--
That illusion will be broken.
Craft love of the natural
Know it
Live it
Live in it
Cultivate
Take nothing for granted.
- Phil Wolfson
On Children
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.
- Kahlil Gibran
Love this Larry. Have heard the first few verse as a song--did not realize it came from Kahlil Gibran. Thank you. Lilith
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
Oh, my now I just watched the beautiful video and heard the song that you posted with it. Thank you!!!
Lilith
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Lilith Rogers:
For The Children
The rising hills, the slopes
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up
up, as we all
go down.
In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.
To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:
stay together
learn the flowers
go light
- Gary Snyder
Nothing
Nothing sings in our bodies
like breath in a flute.
It dwells in the drum.
I hear it now
that slow beat
like when a voice said to the dark,
let there be light,
let there be ocean
and blue fish
born of nothing
and they were there.
I turn back to bed.
The man there is breathing.
I touch him
with hands already owned by another world.
Look, they are desert,
they are rust. They have washed the dead.
They have washed the just born.
They are open.
They offer nothing.
Take it.
Take nothing from me.
There is still a little life
left inside this body,
a little wildness here
and mercy
and it is the emptiness
we love, touch, enter in one another,
and try to fill.
- Linda Hogan
Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad
Why should not old men be mad?
Some have known a likely lad
That had a sound fly fisher's wrist
Turn to a drunken journalist;
A girl that knew all Dante once
Live to bear children to a dunce;
A Helen of social welfare dream
Climb on a wagonette to scream.
Some think it matter of course that chance
Should starve good men and bad advance,
That if their neighbours figured plain,
As though upon a lighted screen,
No single story would they find
Of an unbroken happy mind,
A finish worthy of the start.
Young men know nothing of this sort
Observant old men know it well;
And when they know what old books tell
And that no better can be had
Know why an old man should be mad.
- William Butler Yeats
https://www.waccobb.net/forums/wacco...7_10-40-00.png
The Wind That Shakes the Barley
There's music in my heart all day,
I hear it late and early,
It comes from fields are far away,
The wind that shakes the barley.
Above the uplands drenched with dew
The sky hangs soft and pearly,
An emerald world is listening to
The wind that shakes the barley.
Above the bluest mountain crest
The lark is singing rarely,
It rocks the singer into rest,
The wind that shakes the barley.
Oh, still through summers and through springs
It calls me late and early.
Come home, come home, come home, it sings,
The wind that shakes the barley.
- Katharine Tynan
The Wind That Shakes The Barley
I sat within a valley green,
I sat there with my true love,
My sad heart strove the two between,
The old love and the new love, -
The old for her, the new that made
Me think of Ireland dearly,
While soft the wind blew down the glade
And shook the golden barley.
Twas hard the woeful words to frame
To break the ties that bound us
Twas harder still to bear the shame
Of foreign chains around us
And so I said, "The mountain glen
I'll seek next morning early
And join the brave United Men!"
While soft winds shook the barley.
While sad I kissed away her tears,
My fond arms 'round her flinging,
The foeman's shot burst on our ears,
From out the wildwood ringing, -
A bullet pierced my true love's side,
In life's young spring so early,
And on my breast in blood she died
While soft winds shook the barley!
I bore her to the wildwood screen,
And many a summer blossom
I placed with branches thick and green
Above her gore-stain'd bosom
I wept and kissed her pale, pale cheek,
Then rushed o'er vale and far lea,
My vengeance on the foe to wreak,
While soft winds shook the barley!
But blood for blood without remorse,
I've ta'en at Oulart Hollow
And placed my true love's clay-cold corpse
Where I full soon will follow;
And round her grave I wander drear,
Noon, night and morning early,
With breaking heart whene'er I hear
The wind that shakes the barley!
- Robert Dwyer Joyce
Of Spouses and Fires
Half lose their husbands or their wives,
Far fewer lose homes to wildfires.
The first though worse no one survives.
Obstinate the second transpires.
No pain tops death of spouse or child,
Gloom bone cancer real or phantom
From home your hearth you’ve been exiled
Hymn of passing your sole anthem
What happens with the house rebuilt
Or another one discovered
Might fickle need produce new guilt
Front door unrecovered?
When might longing for what has passed
Transform to smoke none understands
It’s futile wisdom we’ve amassed
While gods do laugh at human plans.
- Ed Coletti
Last Night the Rain Spoke to Me
Last night
the rain
spoke to me
slowly, saying,
what joy
to come falling
out of the brisk cloud,
to be happy again
in a new way
on the earth!
That’s what it said
as it dropped,
smelling of iron,
and vanished
like a dream of the ocean
into the branches
and the grass below.
Then it was over.
The sky cleared.
I was standing
under a tree.
The tree was a tree
with happy leaves,
and I was myself,
and there were stars in the sky
that were also themselves
at the moment
at which moment
my right hand
was holding my left hand
which was holding the tree
which was filled with stars
and the soft rain –
imagine! imagine!
the long and wondrous journeys
still to be ours.
- Mary Oliver
A Blessing
Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their
happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
- James Wright
THE POWER OF NOW AND THEN
Now
And then
Are a spinning top:
A whirling blur of what
May have occurred way back
then in places like Egypt and at Mt. Sinai
But more recently Einstein and that quantum gang
Have informed us that now and then were one and the same.
You no doubt remember how Moses’ rod transformed into a snake
And soon after Hashem separated the Sea of reeds for the Hebrews
And so the sacred texts contain numerous moments where we see
That the stories in our hearts are not meant to be fact checked but
Are instead the ever-burning bushes illuminating one moment
That gets misconstrued as the retelling of a newspaper story
And even worse, an ironclad prediction of a cataclysm
When actually the biblical narrative circles around
The great mandala sparks of universal truths
That are forever living and rocking in the
Nestling arms of the great mysterious
Author Begetter and Originator
Of all beginnings middles
And endings of the one
Forever unfolding
And amazing
Now
Can you tell us who the poet is ?? Thanks....
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
The Listening Buck
Sunday morning at the trail head,
in the east a sky kindling
over the shadowed hills.
We chat and walk in the half-light
holding hands, sometimes silent,
a kiss beside the way.
A day for beginnings and a long
climb into clear morning.
The path mounts over the rocky shoulder
of Tam’s west side. So still up here --
the clarity of the world and the sea.
We rest in a small glade--
some bread and cheese,
then out comes our book
and we read to each other.
A sound, a fallen twig, we turn to see
a buck has come quietly through the woods,
his ankles sunken in old leaves, ears piqued,
his neck stretched out to hear our words.
- Kevin Pryne
This Is Not Trivial
When prayers and good thoughts
are not enough
When a moment of silence and flag
half-mast seem irrelevant
When sending best wishes
When hoping
When contributing to a fundraising campaign
When signing a petition
When singing in a choir
lift your spirit only for a moment
When crying alone
In your kitchen
Serves no one, not even you
May you smile lovingly still
into the tired eyes of the man holding a cardboard sign
May a kindness be offered
on the passing plate
May we dare allow the sad sad news
that penetrates the fortress of longing
to melt like an altar candle
lit for one day of peace
May we remember
As a member
Of the human race
Fortunate enough
Healthy enough
Alive enough
To have this poem
Touching us
Right now
We can make every breath matter
We can forgive outrageously one more person today
We can look out from our doorway and say yes
I am here. I am here.
Is there any other way to fight?
This is not trivial:
LOVE
It matters
- Kristy Hellum
The Spring
(After Rilke)
Spring has returned! Everything has returned!
The earth, just like a schoolgirl, memorizes
Poems, so many poems. ... Look, she has learned
So many famous poems, she has earned so many prizes!
Teacher was strict. We delighted in the white
Of the old man's beard, bright like the snow's:
Now we may ask which names are wrong, or right
For "blue," for "apple," for "ripe." She knows, she knows!
Lucky earth, let out of school, now you must play
Hide-and-seek with all the children every day:
You must hide that we may seek you: we will! We will!
The happiest child will hold you. She knows all the things
You taught her: the word for "hope," and for "believe,"
Are still upon her tongue. She sings and sings and sings.
- Delmore Schwartz
The New Breed
for Emma Gonzalez and the other student activists
I see her on TV, screaming into a microphone.
Her head is shaved and she is beautiful
and seventeen, and her high school was just shot up,
she's had to walk by friends lying in their own blood,
her teacher bleeding out,
and she's my daughter, the one I never had,
and she's your daughter and everyone's daughter
and she's her own woman, in the fullness of her young fire,
calling bullshit on politicians who take money from the gun-makers.
Tears rain down her face but she doesn't stop shouting
she doesn't apologize she keeps calling them out,
all of them all of us
who didn't do enough to stop this thing.
And you can see the gray faces of those who have always held power
contort, utterly baffled
to face this new breed of young woman,
not silky, not compliant,
not caring if they call her a ten or a troll.
And she cries but she doesn't stop
yelling truth into the microphone,
though her voice is raw and shaking
and the Florida sun is molten brass.
I'm three thousand miles away, thinking how
Neruda said The blood of the children
ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.
Only now she is, they are
raising a fuss, shouting down the walls of Jericho,
and it's not that we road-weary elders
have been given the all-clear exactly,
but our shoulders do let down a little,
we breathe from a deeper place,
we say to each other,
Well, it looks like the baton
may be passing
to these next runners and they are
fleet as thought,
fiery as stars,
and we take another breath
and say to each other, The baton
has been passed, and we set off then
running hard behind them.
- Alison Luterman
Seventy Five
11 November 2017
And I think to myself, I’ll remember
this early dark and the rain; standing
before the toile-draped window, water
streaking the glass and dripping
from the low, curled iron; leaves of
wisteria vines, gold and green, trembling
in the November wind that ruffles
through the Cour Damoye.
I’ll recall Olivier, the coffee man
who calls bonjour as he brews his exotic
dark grinds in a small industrial shop
across the cobblestones.
And of course I can’t forget how
one leans full-bodied into the great iron
gate to open it at midnight, coming home
from salsa-dancing eating a hot dog.
I’ll remember every moment in its own way and
for it’s own reason or for no reason at all:
I’ll remember that on this Parisian lane
I was young one more time
- Audrey Ward
The Birthing
Call out the names in the procession of the loved.
Call from the blood the ancestors here to bear witness
to the day he stopped the car,
we on our way to a great banquet in his honor.
In a field a cow groaned lowing, trying to give birth,
what he called front leg presentation,
the calf comes out nose first, one front leg dangling from his mother.
A fatal sign he said while rolling up the sleeves
of his dress shirt, and climbed the fence.
I watched him thrust his arms entire
into the yet to be, where I imagined holy sparrows scattering
in the hall of souls for his big mortal hands just to make way.
With his whole weight he pushed the calf back in the mother
and grasped the other leg tucked up like a closed wing
against the new one’s shoulder.
And found a way in the warm dark to bring both legs out
into the world together.
Then heaved and pulled, the cow arching her back,
until a bull calf, in a whoosh of blood and water,
came falling whole and still onto the meadow.
We rubbed his blackness, bloodying our hands.
The mother licked her newborn, of us oblivious,
until he moved a little, struggled.
I ran to get our coats, mine a green velvet cloak,
and his a tuxedo jacket, and worked to rub the new one dry
while he set out to find the farmer.
When it was over, the new calf suckling his mother,
the farmer soon to lead them to the barn,
leaving our coats just where they lay
we huddled in the car.
And then made love toward eternity,
Without a word drove slowly home. And loved some more.
- Deborah Digges
The Seder Dinner
For Sherrye on her 80th birthday
The emerald in the jeweler’s case is magnificent,
for it is rare;
the shimmering green dragonfly in the sun is more so,
for it is not.
Life constantly presents itself in a vast, breathtaking array
of ingredients; to make of it what we will.
A child wishes for an unending menu of desserts,
but the wise cook knows the balance of sweet and bitter,
rich and lean.
She works with what is given, eating each meal
as the feast that it is.
Unconcerned with whether the kitchen is clean
or if the pantry is full for tomorrow,
she savors each bite of the complex and rich stew that has
cooked over time, knowing that it nourishes her with a
deepening wisdom; a satisfying repast.
Live in fullness for all of your days.
- Alan Cohen
Passover
A sharing of
something I embrace
through generations—
My Mother,
Mother’s Mother,
Mother before her, them,
handed down through our bones
our blood.
Tapping into a rich heritage
bonding with the old
creating anew,
I cook, clean,
come together within myself.
An inner expression
shared openly, lovingly
with those in my presence.
Passover is a gift
of history
passed on to you.
Welcome.
- Sherrie Lovler
Easter Exultet
Shake out your qualms.
Shake up your dreams.
Deepen your roots.
Extend your branches.
Trust deep water
and head for the open,
even if your vision
shipwrecks you.
Quit your addiction
to sneer and complain.
Open a lookout.
Dance on a brink.
Run with your wildfire.
You are closer to glory
leaping an abyss
than upholstering a rut.
Not dawdling.
Not doubting.
Intrepid all the way
Walk toward clarity.
At every crossroad
Be prepared
to bump into wonder.
Only love prevails.
En route to disaster
insist on canticles.
Lift your ineffable
out of the mundane.
Nothing perishes;
nothing survives;
everything transforms!
Honeymoon with Big Joy!
- James Broughton
Seven Stanzas at Easter
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit,
the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that--pierced--died, withered, paused, and then regathered
out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
- John Updike
Pentecost
Passover and Easter: two moon linked sisters
who long ago stopped speaking to one another:
linked to the fullness in our hearts
and the fullness of God’s grace.
The moon of Sister Miriam desires freedom –
to rescue her people from the cruelty of Pharaoh,
by the outstretched, mighty hand of Hashem:
a hand of salvation reaching down from heaven,
and passing through my nation,
and down through yours,
and then to each and every one of us – so may it be!
The moon of Mother Mary desires to give her light
so that each man and woman might know
the power of the resurrection,
and the soil of death that holds the seeds of rebirth within:
a resurrection reaching upward,
passing through all nations and up to God Almighty!
Two celebrations: two women: Miriam and Mary,
who don’t even know they have the same name –
one in Hebrew and one in Greek –
yet inexorably linked to a single full moon.
And then we each begin to count:
we both count to fifty –
beyond the forty days of Moses on Mt. Sinai
and Jesus in the wilderness.
We go beyond, one cycle further:
to fifty, Shavuot, the Pentecost.
Ours to the revelation of Torah at Sinai.
Yours to the revelation of the Holy Spirit.
Freedom and resurrection. Revelation and revelation.
Twelve tribes and twelve disciples.
One moon, two traditions.
Two covenants, One God.
Shavuot and Pentecost: two cousins
who have just begun to speak.
And King David is singing to us
from his tomb today:
“Teach us to count our days
that we may open our hearts to Your Wisdom.”
Some of us, thank God, are listening!
- Rabbi David Zaslow
Litany
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they are dreamed and are dead.
from Yeats’ “Easter, 1916”
Enough to know.
They are dreamed.
And are dead.
The litany in my head
Utters their names
One by one.
Dead. Not dead.
Dreamed.
The beginning. Kneel down
On the cold stone floor.
The stone of the heart recalls first
Her name. Mary. The Grandmother,
The grandmother from Wales
Whose voice always took me to the lilt
Of Dylan Thomas.
Then the children: Marietta Walker,
First child of the young bride.
Donald, after her husband,
Who worked in the mine.
Carrie. Bill. Sam. Norval.
The family grew, boys
Following their father
Into the coal-dark days.
The child Kenneth,
The only one never to reach adulthood,
Adored by my mother, Maggie May.
(Maggie May, Margeret, Midge—
Alll names worn by my mother.)
And the youngest: Betty (Mary Elizabeth).
Elbert. Lucy Florence. Robert.
Twelve children and never an angry word
From the parents from Wales, from Scotland.
But the names go on. Chidren
Of their children. Cousins. Brothers.
My knees, on that ancient stone
Known to my memory, have no feeling.
Only telling.
The names
Come faster.
They are hard to say.
And now, in silence,
The stone. My heart. My love.
Say it.
Enough to know.
Dreamed.
And dead.
- Fran Claggett
Riddle
We do not recognize the body
Of Emmett Till. We do not know
The boy’s name nor the sound
Of his mother wailing. We have
Never heard a mother wailing.
We do not know the history
Of ourselves in this nation. We
Do not know the history of our
Selves on this planet because
We do not have to know
What we believe we own. We believe
We own your bodies but have no
Use for your tears. We destroy
The body that refuses use. We use
Maps we did not draw. We see
A sea so cross it. We see a moon
So land there. We love land so
Long as we can take it. Shhh. We
Can’t take that sound. What is
A mother wailing? We do not
Recognize music until we can
Sell it. We sell what cannot be
Bought. We buy silence. Let us
Help you. How much does it cost
To hold your breath underwater?
Wait. Wait. What are we? What?
What? What on Earth are we?
- Jericho Brown